Talking life, death, and nuclear war at the beach

Even on vacation down the Shore, Neil Halloran has nuclear war on his mind.

The 39-year-old data scientist and web developer from Media released a web documentary last week about the most catastrophic of man-made events.

That it would come out just as the American president is engaged in tough bomb talk with the leader of North Korea is a coincidence: Halloran has been working on "The Shadow Peace, Part I" for two years. The 14-minute video, accessible on YouTube, is a sequel to "The Fallen of World War II," a video about casualties in World War II that went viral when it came out in 2015.

His latest video, already viewed 660,000 times, takes a look into the future, toward the devastation that a nuclear World War III would wreak. He sees bigger, more powerful bombs, 10 times the radii of destruction. Darkness. Freezing temperatures. Agricultural disaster. But there's good news, too.

During brunch in Cape May Point near the beach where his wife and three children relaxed Monday, Halloran discussed his work, which combines his passion for visual communication and data with his dedication to social justice.

He said he had made a good living with his Higher Media company, doing web development for credit card companies, among other work. In the grip of an "early midlife crisis," though, Halloran, who has also created a video about AIDS in Africa, doesn't want his resumé to reflect only commercial projects.

"I want to stress how important it is to address the threat of nuclear war, and to list a lot of the progress that has been made" toward keeping world peace, said Halloran, who grew up in Bryn Mawr and attended the University of Pennsylvania.

In his work, Halloran, with rumpled dark hair and a ready smile, presents data about war and peace in a visual context, using symbols and graphics to make his points.

The video begins with a discussion of the casualties caused by the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

"Nuclear weapons have not proliferated as much as we feared they would since World War II," Halloran said. The risk of full-scale war is less today than in previous years, the documentary states, listing protective alliances such as NATO as a reason.

Much of the intellectual underpinning for Halloran's argument comes from the work of Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, which shows that violence has been declining for millennia, and that since the end of the Cold War, the world has seen an overall diminishing in civil wars and genocides.

"It's encouragement," Halloran said, "that the world has done something right — that we've not gone to hell in a handbasket."

What Halloran aims to show us is that "mundane treaties and relationships between countries have allowed peace to be preserved," said Adam Rosenblatt, professor of peace, justice, and human rights at Haverford College and a childhood friend of Halloran's.

These days, Rosenblatt said, we Americans may feel as though we're living "from catastrophe to catastrophe, but there's a huge catastrophe that hasn't happened."

Of course, Rosenblatt and Halloran realize President Trump's pronouncements that the United States is "locked and loaded" and prepared to deliver "fire and fury" to North Korea are a departure from the American norm of keeping a tough line without bombastic rhetoric.

"The president is such a wild card," Halloran said. "It is unexpected for me to be talking about nuclear weapons" in the current bellicose context. "I didn't think it'd become such a topical issue."

Halloran is quick to add that, though he is a man of data, "I'm not qualified to be lecturing folks on nuclear weapons and North Korea."

But before he rejoined his family on a beach that seemed worlds away from conflict, Halloran couldn't resist imparting a lesson he learned from studying war and its immense human cost:

"With nuclear weapons," he said, "it's important that cooler heads prevail."